Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
There's a tendency to refer to the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages.
What were the Middle Ages? What was the character of them? In textbooks maybe a hundred years ago, they were often referred to as the Dark Ages. And that was a wonderful way of being able to say, nothing important happened and we can skip it.
Chapter 2: What do we mean by the Middle Ages?
And there's particularly a Protestant tendency to do that. Okay, Augustine died. When exactly did Luther come along? Let's go from one good guy to another, and let's ignore the fact that there are only about 1,100 years between them.
Chapter 3: Why were the Middle Ages referred to as the Dark Ages?
Surely nothing much can have happened in those 1,100 years. Let's get to the Reformation. Well, they weren't a dark age.
That's so true, and I think many of us in the modern church, especially Reformed churches, have the impression that things kind of kicked off in 1517 with Martin Luther, and we failed to deeply study the history of God's work from the first century to the 21st century. This is Renewing Your Mind on this Wednesday.
I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and we'll be spending three days looking back to grow in our understanding of our family history as Christians and to see what the Lord was doing in the world. The messages you'll hear this week are from part two of W. Robert Godfrey's overview of church history. in which he explores the hopes, challenges, triumphs, and tragedies of Christianity during the Middle Ages.
And when you respond today with a donation at renewingyourmind.org, we won't simply send you Part 2 of this monumental study series. We'll send you Parts 1 through 6, all on DVD. Plus, you'll receive digital access to all the messages and all six study guides. All this to say thank you for supporting the daily outreach of Renewing Your Mind. So what were the Middle Ages all about?
And why shouldn't we call them the Dark Ages? Here's Ligonier's chairman, Dr. Godfrey.
The Middle Ages a controversial period in all sorts of ways when we come to a study of the history of the church. Controversial as to when the Middle Ages occurred. Now, you think that would be a relatively easy thing, wouldn't you? When were the Middle Ages? Well, one history of the Middle Ages begins at the year 300. Another begins at the year 1100. That's a fair distance between the two
Most histories begin around the year 500 or 600, as historians see a significant shift taking place between the world and culture and thought forms of what we call the ancient period in the West and what comes to be known as the Middle Ages or the medieval period. When we look at the Middle Ages, we ask, where are we going to study? What part of the world are we going to study?
And most Western courses in medieval history focus on what today we call Western Europe. That's understandable. That's where a lot of the action eventually did take place in medieval history.
But it is somewhat distorting because for the people who lived through those early centuries of the Middle Ages, their thoughts went at least as much to the eastern part of the Mediterranean as they did north from Italy. The thought world of the early medieval world, even in the western part of the Mediterranean, still was very much oriented to the east. There was still an eastward look.
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Chapter 4: When did the Middle Ages actually begin and end?
One part I'm calling church and society, where we'll look a little bit more at politics, at institutions, at the response of people in the churches. We might call that the more church history side of what we're doing. And then the other section I'm going to call Paths to God. And that will be the somewhat more theological side of what we're going to do.
Because as we go along, I want us always to remember that while theology is important, and I only say that because R.C. Sproul may be listening. I actually do believe that. While theology is important, it's not everything. And so when we study history, we shouldn't just study historical theology, but we ought to try to see that theology in historical context. Why did people care about theology?
What institutions did theology lead to? What institutions produced theology? What were the great figures that thought theologically, and what influenced them in the ways they thought? How did theology actually trickle down to the churches? You know, if the Lord tarries another thousand years and archaeologists find books by R.C.
Sproul, hopefully they won't need to be archaeologists that find them, but if someone finds books by R.C. Sproul, how much will books by R.C. Sproul tell people in a thousand years about the state of the American church in the early 21st century? We wish those books would tell us more about the reality of church life in America than in fact they would.
So there's always a divide between good theology in a period and what actually gets down to the people. That's part of what we want to look at as well.
So we want to look at church history that I'm going to be talking about largely under the topic church and society, and then I want to look at paths to God, that is theology, and how people tried to think through how they are going to be related to God. So, that's how we're going to be proceeding. I hope that's clear, and if it's not, I'll be reiterating it as we go along.
So, warming up, first part, church and society, looking at something of church history. I've already made the point that one of the mistakes that sometimes are made when we come to medieval history is to forget the continuing connection east and west. to simply take the textbook date of 476, which almost any textbook will tell you is the date when the Roman Empire collapsed in the West.
So many textbooks say, well, when the Roman Empire collapsed in the West, that was the end of the ancient period in the West, and medieval history started in 477. If history were that neat, it would be easier to write And we'll actually talk in a minute about where that date 476 came from. But it does raise an interesting question for us to pause a minute over. When did the Roman Empire end?
And it turns out that's a little trickier question than you might have thought.
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Chapter 5: What part of the world does medieval history focus on?
We know when the Roman Empire began. It's when Octavian, the nephew of Julius Caesar, was able to defeat Anthony and Cleopatra, the last major resistance to his authority, and to establish himself as Augustus, as the worthy one, the honored one, the august one, and become emperor. And this was in the period of 27 BC until his death in 14 AD.
So it is relatively easy to say when the Roman Empire began, but when did it end? Well, as I've already said, many have said it ended in 476 with the collapse of the Western Empire. The trouble is that when Augustulus Romulus died in 476 AD,
the West elected another emperor who's always been neglected by history and probably didn't really amount to much, but still, Augustulus Romulus didn't amount to much either. So the Western Empire did sort of continue, at least struggle along a little while after that. And besides that, there's still the empire in the East, centered in what was Byzantium, modern-day Istanbul.
The emperor there continued to insist that he was the Roman emperor and that the Roman Empire survived. And that empire continued until Constantinople was overrun by the Turks in 1453. So there is a Roman Empire really through the whole Middle Ages in the East. sometimes shrinking, sometimes growing, sometimes struggling, sometimes remarkably vital, and always there.
And even when the Roman Empire in the East finally is snuffed out in 1453, it's not quite the end of the story because in the year 800, a king in France and Germany by the name of Charles is crowned Holy Roman Emperor. And the Roman Emperor in the East sends his approval for the appointment of a new Roman Emperor in the West. So in 800, the Roman Empire is revived in the West.
Now, that Western Roman Empire survives down till 1806. It increasingly doesn't amount to much. The title increasingly becomes just a title, sort of in the way that for many, many years the monarchs of England were styled King of England and King of France, even though they never set a foot in France. Titles sometimes live on beyond realities, but still.
In some formal sense, the Holy Roman Empire survives down until 1806 when Napoleon says, this silly thing is ended. Now we all know, at least it always used to be taught in schools, the essential character of the Holy Roman Empire was this. It was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. But the power of the idea of continuity was so strong and so attractive
that Charles, known to history as Charlemagne, Charles the Great, Charlemagne wanted to be invested with that dignity, with that title, and so it continued. Finally, really located in Austria, but still that title, still the coronation garb in Vienna, worn at the coronation of the Austrian emperors until 1806, styling themselves Holy Roman Emperors.
One could even argue that beyond 1806 we see remnants of that Roman Empire. The Tsar in Russia insisted that Moscow, after the fall of Constantinople, became the third Rome. And the Tsars used Byzantine eagles as the signs of their empire. And the word Tsar is derived from Caesar, Caesar, the ancient Roman title. So there's a kind of Roman Empire that survives down until 1917. And then...
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